15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring&nbspURLs

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO—the structure of domain names and URLs—and I think it's high time to revisit. But, an important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an "it would be great if we could," not an "if we don't do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well." Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.

#1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

It's hard to argue this given the preponderance of evidence and examples of folks moving their content from a subdomain to subfolder and seeing improved results (or, worse, moving content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the engines use to judge whether content should inherit the ranking ability of its parent domain seem to have trouble consistently passing to subdomains.

That's not to say it can't work, and if a subdomain is the only way you can set up a blog or produce the content you need, then it's better than nothing. But your blog is far more likely to perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of your site's content perform well if it's all together on one sub and root domain.

#2: The more readable by human beings, the better

It should come as no surprise that the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.

Readability can be a subjective topic, but hopefully this illustration can help:

The requirement isn't that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean and perfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and, hopefully, compelling to those seeking its content.

#3: Keywords in URLs: still a good thing

It's still the case that using the keywords you're targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is true for several reasons.

First, keywords in the URL help indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they hover on a link to click that they're getting what they want and expect, as shown in the Metafilter example below (note how hovering on the link shows the URL in the bottom-left-hand corner):

Second, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, and when there's no anchor text used in a link, the URL itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for rankings), e.g.:

Third, and finally, keywords in the URL show up in search results, and
research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click.

It's important that your keyword research is well-informed, especially if they're used in your URL. We use and recommend Keyword Explorer if you're in search of a free tool to get started with.

#4: Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize 'em!

If you have two URLs that serve very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there's no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if you want to maintain slightly different versions for some visitors, e.g. a printer-friendly page).

Duplicate content isn't really a search engine penalty (at least, not until/unless you start duplicating at very large scales), but it can cause a split of ranking signals that can harm your search traffic potential. If Page A has some quantity of ranking ability and its duplicate, Page A2, has a similar quantity of ranking ability, by canonicalizing them, Page A can have a better chance to rank and earn visits.

#5: Exclude dynamic parameters when possible

This kind of junk is ugly:

If you can avoid using URL parameters, do so. If you have more than two URL parameters, it's probably worth making a serious investment to rewrite them as static, readable, text.

Some dynamic parameters are used for tracking clicks (like those inserted by popular social sharing apps such as Buffer). In general, these don't cause a huge problem, but they may make for somewhat unsightly and awkwardly long URLs. Use your own judgement around whether the tracking parameter benefits outweigh the negatives.

Research from a
2014 RadiumOne study suggests that social sharing (which has positive, but usually indirect impacts on SEO) with shorter URLs that clearly communicate the site and content perform better than non-branded shorteners or long, unclear URL strings.

#6: Shorter > longer

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value.

This isn't a direct problem with Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed, and while these might all add up to only a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).

#7: Match URLs to titles most of the time (when it makes sense)

This doesn't mean that if the title of your piece is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of them cost me my entire Lego collection)" that your URL has to be a perfect match. Something like

randswhisky.com/my-favorite-7-islay-whiskies

would be just fine. So, too would

randswhisky.com/blog/favorite-7-bottles-islay-whisky

or variations on these. The matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver on that expectation with the headline/title.

It's for this same reason that we strongly recommend keeping the page title (which engines display prominently on their search results pages) and the visible headline on the page a close match as well—one creates an expectation, and the other delivers on it.

For example, above, you'll see two URLs I shared on Facebook. In the first, it's wholly unclear what you might find on the page. It's in the news section the BBC's website, but beyond that, there's no way to know what you might find there. In the second, however,
Pacific Standard magazine has made it easy for the URL to give insight into the article's content, and then the title of the piece delivers:

We should aim for a similar level of clarity in our own URLs and titles.

#8: Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

You can see in the URL of this particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in "for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.

It's not merely the poor readability these characters might cause, but also the potential for breaking certain browsers, crawlers, or proper parsing.

#10: Limit redirection hops to two or fewer

If a user or crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C, but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops, you could get into trouble.

Generally speaking, search engines will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they've recommended against the practice in the past, and for less "important" URLs (in their eyes), they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.

The bigger trouble is browsers and users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers in particular can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings. Keep redirects to a minimum and you'll set yourself up for less problems.

It's not that the slashes (aka folders) will necessarily harm performance, but it can create a perception of site depth for both engines and users, as well as making edits to the URL string considerably more complex (at least, in most CMS' protocols).

There's no hard and fast requirement—this is another one where it's important to use your best judgement.

#12: Avoid hashes in URLs that create separate/unique content

The hash (or URL fragment identifier) has historically been a way to send a visitor to a specific location on a given page (e.g. Moz's blog posts use the hash to navigate you to a particular comment, like
this one from my wife). Hashes can also be used like tracking parameters (e.g. randswhisky.com/lagavulin#src=twitter). Using URL hashes for something other than these, such as showing unique content than what's available on the page without the hash or wholly separate pages is generally a bad idea.

There are exceptions, like those Google enables for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.

#13: Be wary of case sensitivity

A couple years back, John Sherrod of Search Discovery
wrote an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

In an ideal world, you want URLs that use the wrong case to automatically redirect/canonicalize to the right one. There are htaccess rewrite protocols to assist (
like this one)—highly recommended if you're facing this problem.

#14: Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators

Notably missing (for the first time in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat underscores and hyphens similarly.

Spaces can work, but they render awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability of your pages. Try to avoid them if possible (it's usually pretty easy in a modern CMS).

#15: Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy

Check out the search result listing below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL. That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against wanting to click.

Repetition like this doesn't help your search rankings—Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don't hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs.

Best of luck with all your URL creation and optimization efforts! Please feel free to leave any additions, ideas, or observations in the comments below.

Thanks Rand. It's good to see some technical SEO material as lately it's been getting harder to find any in between all of the, obviously very important, Inbound Marketing / Brand Building content.

I assume this will boil down to the specific wording used, but as it currently stands I would strongly disagree with the point #12 - "Avoid hashes in URLs unless absolutely essential". In my view hashes provide an extraordinary level of technical creativity / flexibility that can be funnelled to improve one's SEO Architecture.

You yourself have once promoted the idea of using hashes to condense multiple nonSEO pages / links (e.g. about us, contact, Ts & Cs, etc.) into a single destination with all of the content sitting within a single "page" but navigable with in-page anchors (#hashes).

Separately from this there are many great use cases for hashes for purposes other than in-page navigation. Just a handful of examples:

On the back of your point #5 hash parameters can be used to replace url parameters for tracking purposes, e.g. example.com/product#utm_source=whisky+aggregator (in GA you would have to enable _setAllowAnchor() for this). Which would stop search engines from having to consider each parameterized page as a unique destination.

Hash parameters can be used for passing around technical information within your site e.g. this distilled.net/store/profile/login/?next=/training/mobile-seo-guide/ should really be this distilled.net/store/profile/login/#next=/training/mobile-seo-guide/

Hashes can be used for inbound links which are supposed to trigger some technical functionality on the site. E.g. if you wanted link to a "Buy it now" page from internal or external locations you could use this link www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151417855182#buy-it-now, with on-page JS triggering a "Buy it now" lightbox popup and you would have a link sending link juice to the relevant product page instead of using something like checkout.payments.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?XOProcessor&TransactionId=-1&item=151417855182&quantity=1 which blocks most / all strength from passing through to the rest of your site.

The one place I'll agree hashes are causing more problems than they're solving is if you have decided to develop some or the whole of your site as a "single page application", with hashes being used as replacements for real unique URLs for content you actually want indexed and ranking on search engines.

Hi Tomas - fair points and good additions. I agree I'm being a bit broad, but I would argue that in general, if you can convert URLs with unique content (vs. the very fine and useful usecase of linking to elements in a page) to use non-hash, static, more readable URL formats, it's a better idea.

The examples you gave are mostly links to "in-content" pieces, which I think are precisely the usecase I outlined as being just fine. Tracking parameters is a good addition to that, too, but I'd say that for faceted navigation, if you can use systems that don't require the URL string (e.g. cookies/sessions/etc) that's oftentimes better, and many modern sites are doing this.

p.s. I did edit the list and point to include what you noted - thanks again for the suggestions!

Regarding the use of underscore and hyphen, Google and Bing do seem to handle them differently, at least when used within a search phrase, so perhaps some doubt therefore as to whether they handle them equally within URL's.

For example, the searches "office-furniture" and "office_furniture" (ie. string match) produce very different sets of results on Google, but apparently identical ones on Bing (both based on UK versions). So is it a given that they are treated equally in URL's?

Edit: Just took a look at the G webmaster guidelines and they still advise use of "-" over "_" in URL's.

Yeah - I've been looking across URLs and it appears Google, sometime in the last 2 years, started properly parsing underscores as word separators, and you can now see these in their SERPs highlighting. They even seem to have gotten better when there's no word separators (e.g. com/folder/welcometomypost will get seen by Google as a URL containing "welcome to my post"), thus, I'm not telling folks to rewrite or strongly avoid underscores. If it's totally at your own option, I'd probably still slightly bias to hyphens, but you should be fine either way these days.

Its has been a long trip for me with this in recent months: passing a blog on subdomain to a subdirectory, url with 3 and 4 subfolders to only 1, separating words from underscore to hyphens ... and every change I turned Google crazy with redirects and deleting pages. Honestly, the number of visitors to the page has not improved substantially but personally I pretty much prefer the new organization, for clarity for the user and for me. Thanks for this guide :)

I'm wondering about local. Let's say I'm a therapist in Boulder, CO, and I have separate speciality pages for each issue I treat. Should I add local modifiers to my URLs, such as sitename.com/anxiety-treatment-boulder-co ? Or is that too spammy?

If you think it's useful for visitors, and it helps denote separate sections (e.g. you also have anxiety-treatment-denver-co), then I think it's OK, but to me it borders a bit on keyword stuffing. I might instead opt for sitename.com/boulder/anxiety-treatment and sitename.com/denver/anxiety-treatment so each of your locations can have separate pages with info from the therapists and about their unique practices.

Rand - As a quick follow up, if sitename.com/denver/anxiety-treatment listed 50 offices, and you have a page for all 50 offices, would you extend the URL to say sitename.com/denver/anxiety-treatment/1001 where the 1001 is the office ID? Would including "anxiety-treatment" be considered keyword stuffing vs. a shorter url of sitename.com/denver/1001 if the site is about anxiety treatment anyways? Just curious as this applies to many of my clients. Look forward to your reply.

Excellent article Rand! WRT #8, some SEO plugins like Yoast SEO look for the same stop words in URLs that they check for in titles, meta descriptions, and text if the focus keyword phrase contains stop words. We include stop words in titles, descriptions and text for readability.

Your comments are a good reminder that Google and Bing are more sophisticated than Yoast's great tools, and can recognize equivalence when Yoast can't . Don't be a slave to SEO plugin page rating systems.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed this. I use Yoast Premium SEO plugins for my WP site, and I've noticed two rather fundamental problems: (1) Yoast doesn't take into account theme title bars (so if you're using the default title bar on the page rather than a designated <h1> title, Yoast assumes you don't have your keywords in the content of the page, and (2) Yoast is looking for identical phrases in the page title, page content, and in their "focus keywords" box. If there are any stop words or even punctuation differences between any of these three fields, Yoast makes a huge assumption that the page has poor SEO.

A lot of common sense elements to clear up SEO myths, indeed, such as the last point which is my favorite. Seeing repetitive URL strings like that make me do the ultimate cringe! Clean and simple is always best.

isapi_rewrite is the older IIS version of Apache's mod_rewrite. But, like CMS systems, Microsoft realized it was a gaping hole in their platform and released an official (and free) version of what they call URL Rewrite. Only works with IIS 7.0 or later but it removes the excuse of why IIS hosted sites can't do rewrites.

"Short vs Long "This isn't a direct problem with Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience."

If the issue lies with usability and user experience it could be argued that it then has a direct influence on SEO due to traffic/behaviour related signals affecting search rankings. In my opinion, creating a website that is user focussed and then looking at the SEO factors is far more sustainable (and a better business model) than looking at it the other way around! It is not quite that clear cut because SEO needs to be taken into account right from the outset, but not if usability is sacrificed as a result.

Good to know about case sensitive URL's - an easy mistake to make and will check my URL's just in case!

p.s whisky seems to come up as an 'example' a hell of a lot in your posts Rand! Not that whisky is a bad thing...

And I hear you on the impact of user-focused improvements. I try to always note these as indirect, however, because despite being powerful, they're not specifically causal signals in search engine considerations, but rather follow-on effects, which to me is the definition of "indirect."

Indeed they may be indirect by definition and therefore harder to quantify - I think my point is that if you focus on user improvements first you can avoid trying to put 'square pegs in round holes' because you are too focussed on SEO. Quite a hard one to articulate; either way they are both incredibly important aspects and neither should be neglected....just another example of inbound marketing needing a holistic approach rather than social doing their job, seo doing their job, and so on whilst no one talks to each other!

Maybe you should do a case study on how more commerical Scottish brands like Glenfiddich have different inbound approaches to the huge American bourbon brands which are maybe quicker to move on social media....;)

I am so glad you wrote this post. Can you give me your opinion on Filter vs Folders? A classic example is how Expedia or Tripadvisor have structured their URL's via filters instead of using folders. I think this issue needs addressing.

I have a question regarding unique numbers in urls - is this still a valid tactic?

I ask as I'm in the process of migrating a site with over 10,000 articles to a WP site and am wondering if I need to maintain the exact url structure to lessen any negative impact - I'll be 301-redirecting them ...

Thanks for the info mr. Fishkin. A lot of things I was wondering about answered in one place even the thing with the blog (subdomain or subolder) I got one problem with#15 - having a service for Logo Design and dealing with the fact that there is no synonym to Logo and Design that looks reader friendly in my language. I'm planning to write a lot of content for Logo Design in my blog(10 to 15 posts) linking to the service page but as I guess it would be a red light for a spammy content. How could I avoid this and is this a big thing to worry about?

Great article Rand. Quick question, I'm using the Hubspot CMS which has a lot of great SEO tools built in. Only thing, it automatically crafts URLs based on the blog title. I can change the URLs, keep them shorter, etc. But should I go back and edit blog urls where the keyword sits at the end of the URL? Should it sit earlier in the URL, or does it matter?

Rand, I've gone back to this list of suggestions several times over the last several months, and I've finally decided to bit the bullet and update many of my URLs (probably 100+). Is there any benefit to not using redirects, but rather letting Google find them naturally? I know the traditional advice has been to use redirects to preserve SEO, but I cannot help but wonder whether it would be better for a site to have 100+ pages of "new" content (edited pages with new URLs) re-discovered by Google naturally rather than for Google to detect 100+ redirects (which seems spammy). Any thoughts on this?

If those pages have any SEO value today - link signals, trust signals, content signals, user/usage data signals, any rankings at all, etc. I'd strongly urge you to redirect them. 100 pages of "new" content will have to earn ranking signals. Those redirects will help boost them and will help anyone who's ever bookmarked or linked to them get to the right, new page.

Hi Rand, Thank you for posting such useful content on URL structuring. Point 11 - Fewer folders is generally better needs some clarification. Can we read this as no folders is generally better than folders.

Hi Rand, I used to follow each URL structure rules written by you for all of my websites. I am happy to know that I am following the right. Some of my clients didn't understand the reason behind a proper structure. I make them understand but at the same time they show me some example sites which has not the same URL structure as mentioned in this blog post but still in good rank.

My clients always ask me to some write-up (proof) where they can find the URL structure suggestions. I used to give all write ups separately from different resource. But now I found this article where all the important suggestion are given.

For an existing page that's missing keywords in its URL, i.e. .com/services/, do you think it's worth it to edit it to something like .com/keyword-services/ and then 301 Redirect the old URL to the new one -- or is it best not to edit URLs of existing webpages?

If you're just publishing it, go ahead and optimize the URL, but if it's already published and ranking, probably worse to edit the URL and need to redirect the old version than the slight benefit you'll receive.

I assume that a keyword within a site name can be repeated in the URL, just wanted an expert's opinion

eg. for

surgery.com

1. surgery.com/surgery-without-scars would be better than 2. surgery.com/without-scars

what about using synonyms instead 3. surgery.com/operation-without-scars ?

Let me know what you think the best of the 3 option is. (I would personally vote for 2 as the search engines should prioritize the correlation of keywords that are together between the same slashes and surgery without scars has more hits than operation without scar...; what if the number of hits were similar?)

What structure of URL is better by making dynamic addresses looks like static (SEO friendly)? We use example.com/1Q24H2/SEO-friendly-address/ but I have feeling that better is example.com/SEO-friendly-address/1Q24H2/ (this structure using Amazon and Google Play) for SEO?

Hey Rand, Amazing article! I had a question for a sub-domain. If I have a website which serves 2 different location (country) where one is a global domain (xyz.com) and the others server for usa and other diff locations which has subdomain like usa.xyz.com. Is this the best practice to use sub-domain?

A good article, but I noticed how you did not mention the meta tags for title and description. As we all know there is no need for keywords anymore, but title and description still plays crucial roles in page rank.

Also by adding schema to the page it should also give a little boost to the technical seo.

From the beginning of this year I analyze GA of my blog and found that when my blog was on WP and the URL: simbo.com.br/blog/”YEAR”/”MONTH”/”DAY”/keyword-blog-post” I had much more organic traffic than when I changed to HubSpot blog with the URL “blog.simbo.com.br/keyword-blog-post”. Anyone have a good reason for that?

This is a great information regarding SEO and I have read every single word on this page including all the comments. I thank you for this informative article. I am trying to structure my website and I am a bit confused and I need you help. Please tell me which URL to use for my website:

There's a difference between having a keyword rich domain and including keywords in the URL. You don't want to "stuff" the URL but it's important to have them there. It helps tell users what they can expect to see when they land on the page.

We have faced an issue with our domain name. After successfully running the site a year with magento service in the name, last week we got a mail from "Magento" Software that we can not use "Magento Service " in our domain, unfortunately we have to redirect this domain to a new domain.

Yes - that's still the case, as those are entirely separate URLs (oftentimes the one ending in a slash is actually calling the index or default page of the folder, e.g. domain.com/blog/ calls domain.com/blog/default.php or the like). My advice would be to pick one, stick with it, and if you're finding confusion or folks accidentally linking, canonicalize via rel=canonical or 301.

These are all excellent points Rand! I just have one questions regarding 'The Scale of URL Readability' diagram. I noticed that the first URL which is described as the preferred one does not carry the www-header. Does that mean you would say that a website would have a better URL structure if it was just: http://mydomain.com/puppies as opposed to http://www.mydomain.com/puppies?

That's actually totally up to you and should be mostly based on considerations of readability and user-friendliness. Some folks like www because of the historical contexts and associations with familiarity. Personally, I find that for savvier audiences, removing the www and saving the four characters (the three ws and the .) is better.

Hi Rand, i have a question about folders:
if i have many different content related to a same topic on my website, does it makes an SEO impact to have always the same folder ?

Let's say, I have a website about Pro Sports and i have many different contents about Professional Bikes.

I would prefer to place my "Bikes Home" to : domain.com/best-professional-bike/

But then i have a lot of different contents in this Bike category like "Tests", "Comparaisons", "Brands", "Model"s, etc..

So, should all that content go into /best-professional-bike/ ? Like for instance /best-professional-bike/tests/we-tested-the-awesome-2-wheel-bike or /best-professional-bike/we-tested-the-awesome-2-wheel-bike

If it does not make an impact, i would personally prefer to have a shorter folder for all the other content like : /bike/test/we-tested-the-awesome-2-wheel-bike or /bike/we-tested-the-awesome-2-wheel-bike

That's something i ask myself for every client website i do, but i never figured out what's the best solution..

I need some advice please. My client has an extremely long business name but shortening the url does not indicate what they do. Would a generic address eg rescuingyourbusiness.co.za be too vague and bad SEO? Any response much appreciated. The quicker the better ;)

I see this wonderful suggestions I found some intelligent info here also i have read an splendid suggestion here on bloger khan and i feel like i should share cause there always people who like to learn more.

I have something though that still puzzles me and it is related mainly with the reporting part of an SEO work after implementing on page SEO optimization best practices techniques. I am going to start making SEO optimizations in one eshop that is using short product urls i.e. domainname.com/product-name

The website is in greek but a lot of its urls are written in english (not as transliteration though). Due to this the urls do not contain the main keyword in each landing page and they do not also perform well in organic traffic terms. I would like to change the urls using the best SEO practices but I didn't see mentioned in the best practices something for an article/product id inside the url. I believe when a url contains an id (like a primary key for example) then after making url changes it is easier to track in GA the impact of the SEO in a landing page.

Example:

old url:

domainname.com/product-name_productid or

domainname.com/product-name/productid

to

new url:

domainname.com/new-product-name/productid

(both urls keep the same productid)

I have noticed that if such a url structure is kept it is possible in Google Analytics to track the performance of the landing page easily even after a url changes. Just by filtering based on the productId number.

Also, when a very short url is used in a website (domain+productname) then in GA I believe it is hard to report on the impact of the seo on a category of products you might be working on. Because, there is no categorization in the url. How in that case you can track the new traffic performance of product category you have been working on with on page SEO optimization? Everything will need to be linked with categorizations that exists maybe in excel documents and then create functions in excel to link the info. All these are time consuming...

I think for this reasons I would prefer to use a url like:

domainname.com/category/productname/id

And if the product is linked to more than one product category to set which is the primary category for the product, which I guess is handling the canonical url part for the product.

It's a great and I'd say a much needed refresher post.. I have few things in my mind which I like to have your take on that,

When you click any link from twitter, your main URL automatically associates to something like this:(/?utm_content=buffer53e35&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) does it have any positive/negative impact? I heard that generally the "?" doesn't pollute your URL, is it true?

In the WP URLs option, we have several options to select the URL structure, like:

Post Name (/%postname%/ -> www.moz.com/big-news/

Category and Name (/%category%/%postname%/ -> www.moz.com/sports/big-news/

Day and Name (/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ -> www.moz.com/2014/05/01/big-news

Month and Name (/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ -> www.moz.com/2014/05/big-news/

Which one do you prefer? Having the Day/month in URL possess any value?

Regarding your first question The answer is yes "?" do pollute your url and it is crawlable as well, A lot of ecommerce site use "?" when using filters. So it is recommended to have canonical tag of your original url on these pages. Or Block all type of parameters from robots.

Regarding your 2nd question I think [Post Name (/%postname%/ -> www.moz.com/big-news/] and [Category and Name (/%category%/%postname%/ ->www.moz.com/sports/big-news/] are the best url approach in WP but again the shorter is better.

Hi Rand! I have a website that sells "Colored Contact Lenses" and these products are also referred to as, Theatrical Contact Lenses, Halloween Contact Lenses" but they are literally the exact same thing, just different peoples intention when searching..

I'm trying to figure out what a good url structure would be, in regards to hierarchy because they are the same things I feel the 3 categories mentioned above would all be top/primary.. Or should i do colored-contacts/theatrical/, colored-contacts/halloween using "colored contacts" as the base since it seems to be the most basic and also the higher of the search volume.

I can't personally seem to relate any available content with my particular concerns.

I like the post and follow all the steps that you told here. But what about numerical values? If someone use numerical values in url to make it separate from other url then it would be seo friendly or not please tell me. If the answer is yes then what rules we need to follow to use numerical values in URL?

Thanks for this very helpful article, especially the links to further research, like the mod rewrite rules & the Search Discovery article on case sensitivity. I've been hoping to deepen my knowledge of IIS rewrites etc, so this is perfect.

Hey Rand great list regarding URL structuring. What you think about capitalization for specific keyword in URL for example abc.com/Blog/Cloud/xyz and does it makes any difference. I am also not certain with the use of WWW or non www site; I know you will prefer http://abc.com but is there any specific reason or factor behind this?

This article is very useful. I'm wondering if you can help us figure out the best URL to use on a bilingual french/english website. We are using Shopify and it allows us to translate everything except for URLs. I checked several times and it's simply impossible to translate URLs with Shopify. That would involve maintaining two websites, which I don't want to get into.

What would be the best unique language to use in a URL? The one most of your customers use? Or the one which has the most potential to reach people? French is the language of our current customer, but I feel french URLs are keeping us from reaching english customers, which equal to a lot more people here in Canada.

Would you recommend using bilingual URLs? Like /about-us-a-propos-de-nous

Hi Rand. Very interesting article to read. One thing I wanna ask you more. Actually I posted an article and submitted to google using add url to google. After then I saw a mistake -- I had used two types of brackets in article's heading. So I deleted the uneccessary bracket from title and again updated the post. Will it hurt my newly post ranking in Google? This is my post...I was talking about.

So let me ask you... bottom line (until Google throws another curve ball) ...Is an SEF URL (as in a human readable one) a ranking factor in and of itself ? Or is it just a thing that causes a higher click through rate and and therefore good for usability (which also affects rank)?

Thanks Rand! I was still recommending clients not to use underscores! Can you provide any reference showing that they are treated similar to hyphens? Cause everyone seems to refer to Matt Cutts himself pointing out to avoid them.

Years ago, the URL bolding/highlighting would have issues depending on how you typed it - e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rand+pubcon wouldn't show just "rand" individually bolded in the URL. From what I'm seeing, it appears Google's very close to as good at extracting words when the underscore is used as a separator. Either that, or Google's gotten good enough at parsing words even when in run-on-format (e.g. randfishkinpubcon) that word separators are now less critical for SEO.

Thanks for the great article! This post is just about time to ask you -or the audience- about the tricky issue of the URLs with double byte characters. I've found a Q at the q&a forum on this and they say that in this case usability might more important than being URL-friendly: http://moz.com/community/q/double-byte-characters-...

My question: if my keyword contains special characters like "ü" or "ő" should I use those or should I use the "plain" keyword.

The keyword in the URL currently looks like this: /rep%C3%BCl%C5%91jegy/

Great article, Rand--one eetsy beetsy comment about IIS and case-sensitivity in URLs in general. If you're using IIS, yes, it will ignore the case and still serve up mypeatyislay.html when you request it as MyPeatyIslay.Html....BUT really those are technically different URLs, and Google will treat them as separate. Which means if you have some links to it in 1 form, and other links in another form, then you're spreading link juice across two separate (and unfortunately duplicate) pages. Really, you need to 301 one to the other.

Huh. Fascinating! I had seen Google doing a relatively good job auto-canonicalizing those years ago. Have they slipped? Do you have any examples you could point to where Google's not or hasn't counted ranking metrics across two pages simply because of unique capitalization?

I hope that this post circulates around because as a customer, one of the most annoying traits in a link to me is dynamic parameters. I pay close attention to websites URLs before I click on a link, and if the link is doing too much I skip it. It makes me feel unsafe and uneasy to click a confusing link full of dynamic parameters and multiple subfolders. There’s nothing I appreciate more than knowing what I’m going to be directed to before I click a link. Typically when changing the names of my links I try to have it match the title in some variation, and throw a keyword that fits in if I can. For instance, if I’m writing a location page for a plumbing company my URL might be something like, (website.com/Bronx-newyork-repair-plumber.)

Great concepts! I have a quick question. So I work for a local builder in Utah and we are redesigning our site. I am thinking of redoing our site hierarchy and I don't know how to structure our community pages. would it be better to include the city name in the url or not include it to make the url shorter?

Hi Rand, really informative as ever, many thanks. Could I ask one question, you mention canonicalizing URLs that have very similar content... just in the process of reviewing our site to either re-write some of the duplicate content or canonicalize pages with large amounts of 'internal' duplicate content. As an apx guide, how 'identical' do pages need to be before you canonicalizing them? For example, if you had 3 products on different URL's that were all very similar so the product descriptions were part identical (internal duplicate) and part unique, at what point would you consider it could be deemed as 'duplicate' and need a canon, once the duplicate content exceeds 50% of the pages content or a different ratio? Any comments would be very gratefully received.

Interesting post, as always. Even knowing that search engines today are able to track any URL structures, it is best to create as simple and clean as possible URL structure for both search engines and users.Good advice, but as you point out, is not ready to follow to the letter, in which if we do not our position will not be good. It is a list for good guidance on how to do it.

Hi Oliver, That is usually a good strategy in our experience. The title, url and H1 tags need not be the same but can have similarities which could either be synonyms or expansions of abbreviations or sometimes even leaving out elements in the url to create curiosity.

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Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe).

c) another alternative would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder.

In your example, I'd ask whether "red shoes" as a broad term gets all that much search volume and whether it's a filter/facet worth exposing to Google (it probably is, but it might be on the border). I agree that I'd probably choose A over B, though my preference might be /shoes/color-red, /shoes/color-blue, etc.

Let's try a few more real-life examples:

A) randsfootwear.com/shoes/adidas

B) randsfootwear.com/shoes/adidas-shoes

I'd take A over B. In the case of

A) randsfootwear.com/shoes/soccer/puma-cleats

B) randsfootwear.com/shoes/soccer/pumas-soccer-cleats

I'd take B over A.

It's definitely a fine line and a case where you need to use judgement and think about UX/readability/perception ahead of SEO.

In many situation developer, use parameter to categories products in easy way, they don't care about URL permalink. Also one keyword is enough in permalink. Look out Support.google.com URL, they only using product name only once time in permalink. They uses scheme breadcrumbs for rich snippet. I think you should mention schema tags information in this post.

What is the ideal way to tackle duplicate content? Like if we have URLs which open both ways with and without "www". I have tried to find the ideal way for solving it but never got a proper answer. So, what should we use, canonical or 301?

This is a great article! It covers so much ground and provides an information refresh for those already in the industry. There are two points I would like to highlight with regards to Pharma SEO.

#1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

This is a good strategy, for those not in the pharma industry. If we were selling T-shirts, it would make sense to have “tshirts.com” be the main domain and each section within that domain be its own subdomain like “summer.tshirts.com” and “winter-youcrazy.tshirts.com”.

This strategy does not work as effectively for pharma brands. Some brands still use this tactic to present content to both Patients and HCPs, but our stance is to have two separate domains because the audience for brand.com and brandhcp.com are distinctly different.

This was something our SEO team discussed internally and it seems like your article aligns with our conclusion. There are some cases where a brand may have multiple products across one name (Headache™ Daytime, Headache™ Nighttime, Headache™ Toilettime, Headache™ Allthetime, etc.) and each one may speak to the same topic like “dose reduction”.

Rather than forcefully creating folders for each pill, we have chosen to limit the number of folders and make the URLs themselves applicable to their topics.

Once again, thanks for providing something with this much depth in the technical side of URL structure!

As it relates to point #15, while I agree about the spamminess of keyword stuffing, a search for canoe puppies in google returns your example as #1 in organic results. perhaps a different example would prove better but i understand your point.

Great reminders to have a better url structure. Like many different aspects of SEO, it can get complicated and confusing. Sometimes we need a to remember the basics and the users. I've noticed time and again people argue about the importance of the search engine and the user.

You are a man of culture, I love hearing of your whisky exploits and it is a shame to lose a lego collection.

The ideas here are spot on and I think the subdomains are often recognized like an entirely different domain. What we often refer to as domains aren't top level, com is a TLD not moz.com so the authority of com obviously doesn't flow into moz.com or if it does it only does so to a negligible degree. Since moz.com is a subdomain of com then example.moz.com wouldn't inherit authority either, it would be ranked all on its own and would be likely not to inherit penalties.

That's what I am gathering but that's conjecture of course, do you have solid data for or against that idea? Chances are that's exactly what you are saying and I am simply being Captain Obvious or merely rewording it.

What about the process of having multiple URLs for a single page (not two similar pages). For example the main one for SEO purposes another for sharing purposes (shorter perhaps) and any other purposes that we see fit.Obviously they all need to be directing to a single indexable page. Sensible, stupid or no difference?

Thanks for this Rand. This is a great refresher. It would be also be wonderful to understand how some of these automated, especially if on Wordpress. I think a plugin like Yoast SEO can take care of most of these elements as long as the title of the article is appropriate. Ofcourse Yoast gives an option to edit the urls in case the default one is not as per the expectation.

Thanks for pointing out about the case sensitive issues. This is something that probably requires some bit of additional work to get right.

If anyone can help with a question I have regarding how relevant domain extensions are to google search nowadays. I have a website in googles average top 3 and have an older .jobs extension that points to my website. It is quite spendy to keep current and wondered if it is even relevant anymore and why? jobs is actually a keyword but the domain name is not so not sure if I should do away with it or not, any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Great URL primmer I'll be sharing as I agree with all of what you put out.

I am however quite surprised that you missed out the impact of using Structured data (microdata or RDFa) and/or the Schema breadcrumb property (under WebPage itemType) - https://schema.org/breadcrumb on URLs in the SERPs.

Marked-up breadcrumbs render differently in the SERPs - my findings is that few site are yet to fully take advantage of marking up their breadcrumb trails - I typically find about 3-4 out 10 links on page 1 results utilising marked-up breadcrumbs as means of displaying much more human-friendly URLs in the SERPs. Great for UX - which has to be good.

Here is an example: https://twitter.com/KunleTCampbell/status/570311445033959424

This is the Google ref: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs

Great post - one of my main URLs is extremely long, looks a bit spammy to me because of all the keywords it's got in it, however I've been nervous about touching it because it ranks so well. I think it's about time I bit the bullet!

Here's another aspect: How about URL IDs on behalf of Google News? They want at least 3 digit IDs in the URL in order to grant unique news crawling. Some publishers ad it at the end separated by a hyphen. A better way may be to add it at the end after a slash. That way Google News gets its ID but when forwarding the URL to someone you may as well skip that last folder and send the URL without the ID. The link would still work.

This is also a good way to go about adding IDs after the website is indexed without IDs: The old links still work, but Google News links to the new ones. Or does that cause duplicate content issues?

Great article guys. I have a question around wordpress blog posts. I can't structure my posts under the blog subfolder. hierarchy, each blog post http://site.com/blog-post-one and http://site.com/blog-post-two. How can I set it up the to subfolder http://site.com/blog/blog-post-one?

Nice article, very helpful. I have a question, to make sure I understand it correctly:

If I have a company which sells in multiple languages and also has two different section: one targeted towards men and another towards women. Am I correct to understand you'd recommend the following approach:

Let's assume my main keywords are "bachelorette party" ("EVJF" in French, "junggesellinnenabschied" in German) for women and "bachelor party" ("EVG" in French, "junggesellenabschied" in German) for men.

www.mydomain.com/fr/evjf/

www.mydomain.com/fr/evg/

www.mydomain.com/en/bachelorette-party/

www.mydomain.com/en/bachelor-party/

www.mydomain.com/de/junggesellinnenabschied/

www.mydomain.com/de/junggesellenabschied/

?

I'm not really interested in anynone seeing what is on www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com (or /en or /de), as all relevant content would be found on the pages for that language and that category.

An important subsite would then be: www.mydomain.com/en/bachelor-party/las-vegas-bach... - is that too spammy? ("las vegas bachelor party" would probably be the main keyword to be found on, as the competition on the keyword "bachelor party" is too high)

Something very basic but important and necessary in the application of SEO, I've also noticed some web where good url is applied and is tedious reading to be very long, is logical to think that the higher the quality of the web, the better the positioning and nicer presentation of the web.

example:

It's not the same, write a url with many numbers and letters to write one with some description to indicate that the web is the title or subject published.

I read this post thoroughly and got good idea about structuring URL and will implement this in my blog Codepedia.info

But now I have one doubt, just want to clear with you.

I have my blog and its WordPress platform, so my articles are basically a post, as in Moz each article are pages (no post). So in my each post, URL there a year and month part. As I observed in many other Ever green blog article they are not having date part in the URL.

Very useful article, thanks Rand. I loved the way you used the title of the post as an example of how to balance length vs. readability. It is also notable how you recommend using judgement to balance these things rather than trying to stick to an absolute value.

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Patting myself on the back because I do most of this structuring url stuff the right way. Here's a pat on the back to you and Moz for your excellent teaching!! Oh, and you really should put photographer's credit on those pictures someone special takes for you. #HusbandPoints

I just started with a client who has a lot of unique setups that we are trying to clear up. Im changing the domains for their sake but just wanted to double check my thinking with the domain setups.

Main Site: www.abc.com

Vanity URL: www.def.com

2nd Site: www.xyz.com

So at some point a vanity domain (www.def.com) which links to one page on ABC.com but it retains the www.def.com domain, thus creating a duplicate site in parallel to the original site. Included in the footer of the site (remember abc.com & def.com are really just 1 site), a link was included to a 2nd site within this family of sites to www.xyz.com. So XYZ.com has backlinks from BOTH domains now.

I've just updated the pages to have canonical tags with the ABC.com, should I also go through the tasks of making sure that www.def.com resolves to the original www.def.com to remove the duplication and inflation of backlinks?

That is my plan at least, I think Im just looking for the validation in my thinking, knowing that it may be a short-term hit with the "loss" of backlinks but that hit is worth it in regards to making sure the domains are set up properly. thanks for any advice.

Great post, Rand. However I somewhat disagree about your thoughts on stop words (#8). You say that it's important for the URL to be readable, especially in contexts where the URL serves as the anchor text, but sometimes removing stop words makes it unreadable. Just a word of caution more than anything. I believe that the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin removes stop words as default, but I actually change that setting on my sites so that all stop words show, and then I can write it to be something more readable instead.

Thanks for the great job. It's great to know, that I was right when I start using hyphens instead of underscores.

Just one question, for e-commerce with huge amount of products, is it ok use id of product for be sure that the link is unique and let's say structure links like this: www.mydomain.com/1-category/33-subcategory/234-my-product , where the numbers are ids?

Thank you for this post. It's a much needed reminder to update my permalink structure on under performing sites. I use the default Postname on Wordpress now because I realize it's easier to copy and paste the link.

Nice Post! But i want to know that any E commerce website has very long URl Like http://example.com//home-furnishing/bed/bedsheets/pr?sid=vdm,uj4,64i&otracker=hp_nmenu_quicklinks_Bedsheets, still they are getting no.1 in Google SERP.

There are more than one factors for a page to rank in Google, URL structure is one of them. Usually the E-commerce websites that you are referring here have a gigantic domain authority that plays a vital part in their ranks.

I agree with this suggestion, and we have some existing wordpress sites, where it is easy to modify the URL string to include more readbable wording, but if we do, do we also then need to set up a 301 redirect for the previously modified URL, or is that not necessary?

I don't think there's a better breakdown of URL best practices out there, thanks Rand. I've worked with several websites that have seen tremendous organic growth after cleaning up their ugly/ineffective URLs, and as much as I dislike seeing ugly URLs, I also know that when a client has them, that can be a great way to improve organic traffic relatively quickly if everything is updated correctly.

Really great post rand- some of it went way over my head but still really good - lucky I think my developer instilled a lot of this early on. Wondering on your thoughts of putting a keyword further along in a URL vs being the first word that is in it- if that makes a difference to ranking at all.

I would like to add one more thing that if our website has three butoons on the home page (black, blue, red) and if any user click any one of them to read something then it become a new url. For example - mydomain.com/black!?1245,

mydomain.com/blue!?%1 , etc..

Google consider it as new domain which could be case of duplicate content. In that case, we should use # after the main url finished. Like, mydomain.com/#black!?1245 , because google do not consider the url after # and that will help to save from making new domians automatically.

I notice you didn't mention having keywords in the URL will benefit rankings - do you believe the URL is a ranking factor, or not? I was under the impression it is. For example https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&espv=2&q=how+to+do+good+seo+%22php - sites 3 and 4 have .php in their URL however nothing on site/content etc is relevant to PHP. Welcome any thoughts.